Western Short StoryBlue Morning for MemoryTom Sheehan

Western Short Story

Random reflections
of light from Mount Groban made Sheriff Link Colburn think they were
caused by something other than natural. A signal for help? A signal
for danger? Either one should be checked out, even by any man with
the slimmest curiosity and merest concern for a fellow human.

Here he was, due
for this break he was enjoying, the posse chase possibly behind him,
sudden flare of gunshots, blood flying elsewhere in the tight
strictures of the mountains where Kid Crew went to ground. In every
posse run for almost two years, at least one man had been shot
seriously or killed by a fugitive cornered at last in a wadi or a
deep canyon, an old barn, a line shack set back against a cliff
touching the same sky, in the mow of a new barn, or behind a
frightened captive being used as a barrier.

Now and then
there’d be a man counted missing. This latest jaunt saw Ralph
Timbershed adrift from the posse. Nobody had seen him for a whole
day.

To the ground
they’d usually run the guilty one, but Kid Crew had disappeared,
had evaporated right in front of their eyes. One glance and he was in
the saddle on a tricky and narrow ledge cut into the side of the
rock; in the next glance, he was gone. If he had fallen, they would
find his remains. But they found no remains of Kid Crew, just the
horse he was riding, a mass of bloody pulp at the base of the cliff,
ready for the carrion seekers. His saddle was there, his rifle, one
canteen, half of a crudely drawn map with letters and numbers quite
illegible, possibly destroyed on purpose.

In the pre-dawn
flush of gray light, a sky hardly high enough yet to count, a coyote
and an owl calling out their identical kind of hunger for meat and
territory, and with the same kind of music adrift on a dreamy breeze,
Colburn came alert as he rose from a sleep he swore he’d remember
forever. It had been delicious, that sleep, or what he could remember
of it.

The posse had been
called off, acknowledging the trail had been lost, Timbershed still
lost somewhere in the maze, one man wounded, one man killed; Kid Crew
loose as trail dust.

Colburn had ridden
off to be alone; it was his way always at the end of a posse. And his
thoughts, all the images and ideas that had trespassed on his mind
during long hours in the saddle, came with him. They would be
refreshed, retraced, traveled back over in his mind. Declarations
were in the offing.

Suddenly, all about
him, the gray slammed into a high blue, a bright blue signifying the
new day was at hand, making him shake with delight … and interest.
Good trackers always paid attention to clues, hints, signs, changes,
slight whispers caught up in the batch of a breeze, like hitchhikers
eyeing a moving spot down a long straight road, train jumpers with
their ears to a rail, or boaters heading downstream into tomorrow’s
unknown.

Sally Bunning, he
figured, had no part in all of this dreamy stuff being lost in a
sudden twist of his mind, nor did Autumn ‘s Own Burke, as far as he
could tell, as deep as he could go in his dreams of the immediate
past slipping away from him like a fugitive in the night. “Slipping,”
without notice, had become “slipped.”

Both of those women
were beauties of the first take in his mind, like starlight he had
once said of Sally, and readily knowing it also belonged to Ransom’s
Own, a child once stolen before she was named, paid for, returned to
become the raving beauty her father dreamed of, who found the
kidnapper after 7 years and punished him for two long months of
sleepless nights on the open grass.

And thus her name,
Ransom’s Own, with hair as dark as a cave mouth, eyes as bright as
the outside of a tunnel, and who moved like a sapling in a softened
breeze, who sparkled the days back home in River City. He could hear
the music of her being. He could hear love in some notes.

The dreams, with
the sudden brightness, were gone, as well as all folks connected with
the most recent posse chase.

All the signs told
him he’d be alone for the whole day … by himself, at his
pleasures, alone, no single temptation loosed by Sally to keep him
away from Ransom’s Own, or the other way around.

These were the
glorious days when they had to be so.

Unless something
weird tilted them off course, or something slightly awry of the
normal, the latter being the hardest to detect.

The flashing of
light, obviously reflections of the early sunlight, caught his eye
after he drank coffee from a tin cup, tended Romo and then saddled
him, and made sure his weapons were fit and ready for what this day
might bring to him; “By surprise or otherwise,” he was apt to say
and usually did.

The random
reflections came from midway up on Mount Groban, the massive chunk of
rock that was not a mountain to begin with, but had been so dubbed by
folks headed further west half a century earlier; everything small to
them becoming big, and everything big becoming small, all things
relating to their journeys, some without end. Those who kept heading
west often found easy beliefs in supposition, transference, and
inopportune shadows. Such beliefs were legendary; headless horsemen,
masked men dressed in black, monsters who ate the backsides of horses
and cows in one bite, beautiful woman who danced at the edges of
campfires.

Mount Groban was
indeed a chunk of rock popped up in the midst of the prairie running
for a good thirty miles in west Texas and part of New Mexico. It
appeared as if it had been torn loose by Mother Nature from the rest
of a mountain chain further west and tossed like a pebble in the
annals of worldly upheavals into the stretch of prairie. Bright
sunlight now set on that chunk of rock much as a torch might set its
beam.

Of course,
Colburn’d have to investigate the reflections, find their causes;
other than the sun, he hastily advised himself in precaution. He was
posse all the way, riding to the end of every chase with all the
energy he could summon.

The images he
carried in his mind, or erupted in a wild series of flashes, shook
the bright, early morning; Sally smiling from a far corner, Ransom’s
Own at one fair dawn at the edge of a stream, Kid Crew on the
desperate ledge, Timbershed at a dance one night in Colville’s Barn
drunk as a miner with a big strike. Each image shot up differently,
with or without colors or background, with or without sound, with or
without odors, a variety that prevented true pictures, or roots; his
imagination in riot.

After clearing the
area he had slept in, Colburn mounted Romo and headed toward the
source of reflections, sunshine continuing, skies solid blue as far
as he could see.

Discarding what he
could of the images working on him, he concentrated on the last image
he’d seen of Timbershed, forcibly bringing it back from an edge of
the posse campfire, the night flames throwing illumination into
scattered pockets, Timbershed working his rifle clean, driving a rod
up and down the bore with his left hand, the rifle gripped in his
heavy thighs. The man’s wrists were thick as axletrees, and he was
nearly as big as a horse in the chest. The size of some men is
memorable for the long stand.

Now he was missing.

Romo, a fabulous
ride Colburn often said, climbed with ease into the lower part of
Mount Groban, picking his way among abrupt and jagged edges, around
rock chunks, like scatterings from the ultimate weapon, and sudden
overhangs that sat heavy as threats on calamitous walls. It’d all
make anybody nervous, and Colburn realized he was no different
himself, but his horse was. A long time in their past, Romo had let
him know he was as alert as any horse he’d ever sit on.

Now the great horse
sent a message; something here was amiss, a danger crept or lay
hidden, and chance was at play. His ears perked abruptly. A step
forward was halted, that great foreleg suspended in mid- air, the
gesture enough to serve notice to most any rider.

Colburn, already
tuned in by Romo, feeling the message even before he read the move,
ducked his head, shortened his silhouette in the saddle, and shot his
eyes ahead into every darker phase of Mount Groban … cave mouths,
overhangs, blackness anyplace else, any mere sense of movement, light
as a bird’s beak dipping for a seed blown here by the wind.

The thought rushed
him momentarily back to Ransom’s Own who once spent a day telling
him about Anna’s hummingbirds and blue-throated hummingbirds that
made their way in the rolling plains and the high plains of Texas.
Her interests were as varied as her suitors, and included both hand
guns and rifles

The images, of a
sudden, came back in their swift travels: Sally making a
pronouncement in minor shadows, Ransom’s Own revealed in absolute
beauty, Timbershed cleaning his rifle with his left hand, Kid Crew on
the last ledge handling the reins with his left hand and he was a
known killer with a swift right hand on the draw.

Who, he wondered,
was on the ledge that time?

The wondering, even
sensed by Romo from hesitant spur touch, caused Colburn enough
concern that he pulled Romo up short. The great horse froze in place,
like man and rider were one entity, with all ears attentive, all eyes
alert.

Coburn’s
instincts told him he had not really thought about what was in front
of him, what waited on Mount Groban. He parsed and diced options in a
sudden game of choices and chances in a mind exercise that could have
bewildered a lesser man.

Things he had seen
were now, of a certain, not ringing true, were not what he had
believed they were. He thought of disguise and masquerade and silly
play-acting games they’d done as kids in the warm kitchen in cold
winter, that his father called “finding extensions.”

One of those
extensions now came to him, that Kid Crew had looked like Timbershed,
and Timbershed, for a moment, looked like Kid Crew. It was
ridiculous, of course, because they were so physically different, but
the obvious had not shown that, either because of faint light or
shadow, a man being where he was supposed to be and not another man,
or a side glance is often enough to disguise a person better than
that person intended to be someone else.

All this thought
formulated a decision for Colburn, a determination; if he heard, but
did not see, Timbershed, it would be Timbershed; if he saw, but did
not hear, what he thought was Timbershed, it’d be Kid Crew. That’s
how it would go down. He was sure of it.

It said that Kid
Crew had captured Timbershed and would use him to get out of a trap.
If he, Colburn, was the lone and last man close enough to arrest Kid
Crew, that’s how it would go down. Thus, trickery, deep trickery,
was afoot.

If the reflections
were Timbershed-caused, they’d all wash out.

If the reflections
were Kid Crew-caused, to get the last posse man in a treacherous and
deadly position, he’d have to extend himself beyond the apparent.

In a deep shadow,
under an overhang, Colburn made his preparations. He used what was at
hand, what he could find in the immediate vicinity.

He found enough.

If Kid Crew wanted
masquerade, disguise, Colburn’d send it his way.

He stepped into dim
sunlight chopping its way down into lower recesses of Mount Groban,
into the thick fastness of rocks in such a mad scramble it would take
eons to straighten them out.

Colburn heard his
name, distinctly his name, called out, but with a sense of urgency in
the voice, a sign of pain.

The pair, Colburn
and his great horse, emerged from under the prominent overhang and
the thick shadows, into a patch of bright sunlight. They were lit up
like a torch played on them.

Ahead, the burly
Timbershed sat his horse on a ledge. Timbershed waved his right arm
in a short wave, as if showing signs of painful concern. The wave was
weak, pleading.

In an abrupt
maneuver, Colburn waved back, his wave also curt, short, and somewhat
contrived from where he stood.

As quick as any man
could be, Timbershed, the supposed Timbershed, whipped up his rifle
and shot the supposed Sheriff Colburn out of his saddle, the bullet
straight and unerring through the dark blue shirt of the sheriff.

But Colburn, who
had placed his shirt and hat on sticks tied together and mounted on
Romo, had walked out on the unseen side of the horse, his rifle laid
over the saddle pack, fired one shot and took the real Kid Crew out
of the saddle right there on a ledge of Mount Groban.

Kid Crew was dead.
Ralph Timbershed was found badly wounded in a cave mouth and carried
out by Colburn who found a doctor for him at a local ranch.

Later that evening,
Colburn and a group of the original posse buried Kid Crew under a ton
of rocks on Mount Groban. That is, as much of Kid Crew they could
find after scavengers had first pickings.

Hanging is not
always the only way that justice gets done, Colburn agreed, but a
magnificent blue dawn often leads to a good day, for somebody on the
open range, for somebody in the shadows of a mountain.